Portman Bay regeneration contract awarded

The project will recover half of the bay which was filled in by mining concerns

The contract to carry out the environmental regeneration project in the bay of Portmán, in the municipality of La Unión, was finally awarded on Monday by the national Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment, at a cost of only just over half what was originally budgeted when the contract was put out to tender.

The contract has been won by a merger company consisting of Acciona, SATO and Continental at a bid price of 33.4 million euros, as opposed to the originally established figure of 59.5 million. As a result the group will now be removing some two million cubic metres of steriles which were dumped in the bay in the mid-twentieth century by mining concerns, effectively filling in almost all of the area which around two thousand years ago was an important Roman port.

Most of the substances removed from the bay will be transferred to the old San José mine in the mountains behind Portmán, and assuming all goes to plan the work to restore the bay to at least a resemblance of its natural state will last for 46 months. At the end of it the shoreline will have been brought 250 metres or so inland, approximately half of the distance it was pushed back by the intensive dumping of mining waste in the mid-twentieth century.

This regeneration has certainly been a long time coming, and some locals in Portmán will doubtless remain sceptical until the work finally gets under way, but with the awarding of the contract a major step forward has been taken and they can look forward to seeing the start of the project in the New Year.

The case of Portmán is one of the most scandalous instances of contamination in Spain, and the dumping of toxic steriles continued until as late as 1992, when the last mine shut down. Ever since then there have been efforts to ensure that the damage is repaired, and now, after 33 years, it seems that these efforts are about to bear fruit and the coastline of the municipality of La Unión will be re-transformed into something approaching its natural condition.